


Of Easter Bunnies and Resurrections

by NightjarPatronus



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Baking, Chocolate, Definitely a precursor to Fargo, Easter Gift Baskets, Fen/Margo and Julia/Kady/Penny if you squint, Gen, Grocery Shopping, Rated T for the description of a psychoactive herb that makes people see flying horses, Sharing a Bed, Soft!Fen, lots of bunnies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 18:42:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20050744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightjarPatronus/pseuds/NightjarPatronus
Summary: Set in a future where everyone has been rescued, and no one is in immediate danger of perishing. A misunderstanding leads Fen to believe Easter is a celebration of everyone who had come back from the dead, not just Jesus. Alice and Quentin get showered with cupcakes and bunnies and affection.





	Of Easter Bunnies and Resurrections

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HighKingFen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HighKingFen/gifts).

> Surprise, to HighKingFen/Cath/Lover of Bunnies/Maker of Goddess-Tier Fandom Content, from your secret Source of Light Positivity Exchange partner (code name Cottontail)! Have some soft!Fen. You deserve all the Fen, and I figured I’d do you one better than making a massive text post about my Easter headcanon on tumblr.

Fen and Eliot weave through the crowd with the shopping cart after the sushi chef packs up his knives, marking the end of his shift. 

For Fen, WholeFoods Market is strange for many reasons. First off, all the items are tucked into neat little rows and sections, packaged into tight plastic sleeves with stickers for people to pick up. And the strange codes printed on the stickers are necessary to determine an item’s worth, and it changes _all the time_. Plus, there are no farmers inside this indoors market waiting to collect money for the things they’d made. Everything runs through a centralized system, with people specially hired to collect money at the end of the line after computers run through a tally. How can anyone know how much to pay anyone?

Despite all these peculiarities, Fen finds herself volunteering for excursions such as this. Bigby, the former professor, had recruited Margo and Kady for more extensive battle-training following their raid of Whitespire. The rest of them had taken over the duty of escorting Eliot on his twice-a-week shopping trips, knowing he’d insist he’s fine on his own otherwise. 

This isn’t Fen’s first time on Earth, but it’s the first time she isn’t here as part of a life-or-death mission, running around this strange city full of concrete walls. Since her rescue alongside Josh, they had all come back to Earth, leaving Fillory in the temporary charge of Sheila from the Library. They’re all living at the penthouse now, just trying to make sense of everything that had happened. It’s strange to be so close to the group when they’re not planning their next fight, but this is a good change. This is a change that Fen can get used to.

“Carménère?” Fen reads slowly, pointing at the last item on their shopping list. “Eliot, what’s a Carménère?”

“Did Bambi say Carménère?” Eliot stops the cart by a shelf with an assortment of bottles. The sign at the end of the aisle says “wines & spirits”, and he guides them in. “Of course she did. It’s wine. It’ll be here somewhere.”

Cooking meat with alcohol on a non-holiday occasion sounded… unusual, to say the least. Fen had grown up roasting stew by the fireplace with her dad, grilling everything else in a simple cast iron with salt and peppers and fresh herbs. Children of Earth had a way of making the simplest things complicated. 

But then, Fen herself had let go of a life of simplicity ages ago. When it comes to Eliot, anything can and should be necessary. And now that the Dark King is no more, and Fen and Josh are home safe, and Quentin had come back from an impossible fate—now Fen takes the time to watch Eliot cook from the kitchen island and appreciate the strange recipes he creates.

“This is last on the list,” Fen tells Eliot as they wheel their cart to the middle of the aisle. 

“Finally,” Eliot mutters, running his fingers through the labels beneath the wine bottles on the shelves. “Daddy’s starving.”

Fen scrunches her nose, comparing the illustrations on the labels of the wine bottles—drawings of grapes in a vineyard, or wooden barrels. The pictures don’t tell her much, but the numbers do. The expensive ones apparently work better in a steak sauce. Eliot gives a nod of approval, eyeing the bottle of Carménère in the middle of the shelf. He picks it out and lays in the empty space inside the cart on top of the chicken thighs and zucchini.

“Why this one?” Fen asks.

“Margo’s favorite,” Eliot tells her. “I’d have gone with the Malbec. But we’re all home thanks to Bambi and her axes. We'll let her get away with it once.”

Fen remembers her rescue seven weeks ago like it was yesterday: the way Margo had blasted down the doors of her and Josh’s holding cell down in Whitespire, Sorrow and Sorrow in tow. A stranger would have cowered at the sight of Margo, but Fen had beamed. She'd reached for Margo immediately, the chains around her wrists jingling in protest. Margo, in turn, had let out a sigh in relief, a smile breaking through her tough exterior of a blood-soaked black robe and a murderous glare.

“Just this once,” Fen agrees, smiling.

Fen steers the cart out and guides them slowly through the crowd by the checkout section, mindful of the extra weight of Eliot’s arm around her shoulder now that he’d pulled her close. Eliot has been in physical therapy to heal his axe wounds for quite some time and is only now learning to walk an hour or two at a time without his cane.

As they stand in line, Fen notices a pastel-colored shelf lined with grass by the gifts section near the exit. On the top sits a dozen of stuffed bunnies, all dyed a different pastel color. The rest of the shelves are lined with vibrant birds made of marshmallows and unusually-sized eggs covered in colorful foil. 

“I didn’t know they celebrated bunnies on Earth,” Fen says.

Eliot shifts the arm resting on Fen’s shoulder to see what she’s looking at. “Oh, these? They’re for Easter. It’s coming up in a few weeks.”

“Easter’s a holiday for the bunnies?”

“Well, the bunnies aren’t the main theme,” Eliot explains. “Easter’s about Jesus. He came back to life on that day or something. They told us the full story back at Sunday school.”

“So Easter is about resurrections?”

The man standing before them in line had moved over to the end of the checkout counter to pack up his things. Eliot pushes their cart forward, wincing a little at the way his muscles strain. “You could say that,” he tells Fen.

Fen nods and turns away to load their things onto the conveyer belt. Eliot doesn’t say much else for the rest of the shopping trip. Fen can tell he’s burned out from walking and ready to head to the car and go home. She takes another look at the shelf with the bunnies and the strange eggs before they leave, smiling at the way the colors remind her of tulips. 

◊

Fen’s bread loaves had quite the reputation in her village back in the day. She always added fruits to them, whatever fruit was in season. Her favorite was cranberries around mid-autumn, freshly picked a week after Equinox. She and her dad loved to eat them fresh, but she’d always save half of them for baking. Some end up in a jam, and the other half, she’d leave on the windowsill to dry overnight. 

She’s used to baking in an old brick oven, praying to Umber that the fire would burn just right; but baking on Earth is a different matter. There’s no real fire in their penthouse. Even their stoves were electric. Temperatures happen in exact numbers, as do a lot of things on Earth. Josh knows the difference between three-fifty and four-hundred degrees when it comes to baking the perfect genoise, and how many seconds it takes to whip up a French meringue, and the exact temperature, in Celsius, that one needs to get a perfect glossy finish on a tempered white chocolate collar.

When they were locked up in their holding cell in Whitespire, Josh had rambled away to fill the silence, and Fen had held on to every word. He’d traveled the world before he started studying at Brakebills, searching for flavors that he doesn’t have access to back home. And she’d stay awake at night after Josh had dozed off next to her and lay her head against the damp stone bricks, hoping one day they could get to bake again.

And now, three days a week in the early afternoons—before Eliot could saunter his way to the kitchen, cane in hand, and shoo everyone out except Fen—Josh would attempt to devise his next recipe with Fen’s advice, dragging her into hour-long baking sessions.

“Bad news. They ran out of Ghiradelli,” Josh tells her when he gets home on one of those afternoons. “So I had to improvise.”

Josh is later than he usually was, so Fen’s already waiting for him in the kitchen, apron on and ready for work. She stops whisking her vanilla-and-orange-zest sponge mix and peeks her head to see what Josh had in hand. He joins her and sets the grocery bags on the counter, then pulls out a box full of those strange colorful eggs wrapped in foil. 

Fen takes the box from Josh’s hand and opens the package. She takes one out and weighs it in the palm of her hand, moving it about. Nothing swishes inside. “These aren’t real eggs?”

“Nope. Easter chocolate.”

Easter. Right. Ever since Eliot had told Fen what Easter was, she’d been seeing merchandise about the holiday everywhere. “Why eggs?”

“Well, it’s a spring holiday. Animals come out of hibernation. Flowers grow. Lots of hatching. Easter’s all about being alive. Or, you know, coming _back_ to life.” Josh shrugs and unwraps a chocolate egg, revealing the brown shell inside. He places it in a glass bowl on the counter, then nods at the empty pot sitting on the stove. “Fill that halfway for me?”

Fen fills it and puts it back, turning the stove on. Josh places the bowl over the pot, waiting for the water to heat up so the chocolate can melt. “Spring. Right, okay,” she says, putting another chocolate egg inside the bowl. “It’s a resurrection-themed holiday with bunnies.”

“Exactly!”

“And they sell marshmallow birds,” Fen adds. “I saw them at WholeFoods the other day.”

Josh drops in the rest of his chocolates, then crushes the ones inside the bowl into small bits. “You mean Peeps? Yeah. They’re actually chicks. Overpriced marshmallow chicks with a crap ton of food coloring—they’ve been selling Easter shit since February right after Valentine’s was done. Fuck consumer capitalism. But the chocolate’s a plus side.”

“I do love chocolate,” Fen concurs. The oven beeps, signifying that they’ve got the right temperature for their cupcake sponges. She takes out the molds and starts filling them with the batter she’d made. “So these chocolate eggs, are they Easter presents?”

“Could be. For the kids, usually.”

“What do you give to other people? Those who aren’t children?”

“Usually nothing.” Josh turns the melting chocolate inside the bowl with his spatula as steam rises from the water, then sticks a thermometer in and reads the number. “But Easter’s a family holiday. You make a nice dinner. Invite everyone over. My uncles back home used to get wasted, like, all the time. Oh, wine! Wine works as a present.”

Fen tips the last of the batter into the final cupcake mold with a frown. It seems unfair that the children who came back to life get plush bunnies and marshmallow birds and chocolates, and the grown-ups get nothing. Alice and Quentin deserved _something_.

“If you’re really feeling fancy,” Josh adds, turning off the stove. “I’d go with a gift basket.”

“Why would you gift someone a basket?”

Josh sets the glass bowl aside for the chocolate to cool, then turns to her with a chuckle and points at the side of his nose.“You’ve got batter on your face. Right there.” She wipes it off with her apron. “Anyway. It’s not about the actual basket. It’s about what’s in it. You pick out everything you wanna put. Really make it personal. Things you think they might like. That way they know you’ve been thinking about them.”

◊

When Fen shows up at breakfast on Easter Sunday, gift baskets in tow, she finds Quentin sitting at the kitchen island, trying to wrestle himself out of a tight pullover sweater. His chair nearly topples over when he leans sideways, trying to free his arm from a sleeve. Alice puts a hand on the back of Quentin’s spinning high chair and rights it before he can fall, a worn copy of _A Gathering of Shadows_ propped up in her other hand next to her coffee. Julia stands behind Fen and gives her an encouraging nod.

“Happy Easter!” Fen calls out.

Their friends had headed off to brunch today at The Polo Bar around midtown. For novelty’s sake, the restaurant had decided to open a brunch buffet on Easter Sunday to one hundred guests via lottery, and Josh had magic’d a winning ticket for each of them. The note left on the fridge says for Quentin and Alice to join them whenever they’re ready—no one else is here in the apartment except Julia and the night owls.

Alice turns first while Quentin struggles to free himself, the spinning chair creaking as he twists and turns to wriggle himself free. Alice’s brows furrow at the sight of Fen beaming behind her gigantic gift-baskets, decked with pink and mint green bowties. She parts her lips, eyes widening, then closes her mouth again.

“What’s all this?” Alice asks.

Something about Alice’s voice makes Fen wonder if Alice herself had forgotten about Easter. She snaps out of it and hands the first basket to Alice, the one with the five pairs of fuzzy socks rolled up into a giant flower. “It’s for you two. Easter presents. I didn’t wanna take all this to the Bar of Polo.”

“E-Easter presents?” Quentin finally musters when he's free from his sweater prison, stripped down to a white t-shirt.

“Yeah! This is yours.” Fen drops the other basket on Quentin’s lap. The scrolls inside rustle against each other, begging to be opened. “Your Dean Fogg did us a favor. Julia made him do it. Gave us a few copies of his favorite spells.”

“Wow.” Quentin scratches his neck. “That’s… thanks, Fen. Thank you.”

“And chocolate eggs for both of you,” Fen continues, bouncing on the balls of her feet. 

Alice looks at the triplet set of knives in her basket, tilting her head to examine the way the lights around the room hit the blade. Fen had gotten Alice some hand-crafted throwing knives instead of books, considering Alice now runs the most expansive Library in the solar system. A little defensive skill never hurts anyone, and Fen’s been dying to teach someone.

“They love chocolate. I know they do,” Julia adds, walking over. She’s giving them a raised-eyebrow look, but when she catches Fen looking at her, she shakes her head and smiles.

“I saw these at WholeFoods with Eliot the other day,” Fen says. “And then I saw them at every other shop and then Josh baked with them when the shop ran out of the other chocolate he liked—Easter tradition, right?”

“Easter tradition, yes,” Alice says. “Thank you.” 

Next to Alice, Quentin nods, bobbing his head like a bucket inside an overflowing well. His hands fiddle with the sleeves of the sweater on his lap.

“We got bunnies, too.” Fen turns to Julia, whose smile widens. “Never seen stuffed bunnies like these—we usually make them realistic-looking. But these are in Easter colors! Julia found them at Exit9.”

“I-I love them, Fen, I really do,” Quentin says. His bunny plushie, robin blue with white polka dots, has already made a nest on his lap on top of his sweater. He sets the basket on the counter behind him and takes another look inside. “You two make cupcakes too?”

“We waited ‘till you all went to bed last night,” Julia says. “Chocolate with orange zest and vanilla sponge. Josh’s recipe—”Quentin’s eyes widen, making her chuckle—“mostly.”

Fen throws her arms around Quentin and Alice, pinning them against the counter as she knocks the air out of them both. “Happy resurrection day, you two!”

Alice stays very stiff for a second before Fen feels her relax and hug her back. Quentin burrows himself into the hug without wrapping his arms around her, stroking the fuzzy back of his new plush companion with his free hands.

“Resurrection day! Right,” Alice says immediately when Fen pulls away. “How could I forget.”

Fen frowns. “Is something wrong? Did I do something wrong?”

“No! No,” Julia says immediately. “They love it! They do.”

Quentin and Alice chime in again to thank Fen, but not without sneaking a puzzled glance at each other’s way. Fen can’t figure out why they’re so surprised. It was like they didn’t expect to receive Easter presents at all. Why wouldn’t they?

◊

That night, Fen lays wide awake, watching Margo burrow her head into their comforter, her soft breaths tickling her skin. At Fen’s request, they’d kept the curtains open. There are no stars visible in the sky, but Fen had grown up falling asleep by an open window to the soft glow of the streetlamps outside her cabin. In New York, it’s no different, except the lights were electricity instead of torch-lit.

Since they’d come back to Earth, Fen and Margo had been sharing a room. Even a penthouse runs out of space when you’ve got nine people cramped up in it, so Margo had offered to share—even if there’s only one bed. Eliot says Margo didn’t wanna let Fen out of her sight again in case she gets re-kidnapped. Margo insists they always keep themselves two feet apart on the giant mattress meant for couples but never protests when Fen ends up breaking that rule.

“Whatcha’ been thinkin’?” Margo asks, cracking her eyes open as she peeks her head back out.

“Sorry. Did I wake you?”

Margo smirks. “You think you’re the only one wide awake every night, watching a pretty girl fall asleep by your side?”

Fortunately, they haven’t got any night lights in this room. If Margo catches Fen blush, Fen would have never heard the end of it. Did Margo just call her pretty?

“I just—” Fen looks away and turns to watch the ceiling, mumbling, “I didn’t know Easter was only for Jesus.”

After brunch that day, Eliot had pulled Fen aside to explain that Easter was originally a “Jesus-only sort of holiday”. But Alice and Quentin wouldn’t accept any form of apology. They'd insisted that Fen’s gift basket had been a very welcome surprise. 

“To be fair, not a lot of people come back from the dead.” Fen feels Margo’s hand on her shoulder. Margo gives her a squeeze. “Alice and Q might’ve been the first besides Jesus—I fucked up world history in high school, though, so don’t quote me on this.”

“Do you think they’re mad?”

Margo lets out a snort, drawing back her arm. In Margo-speak, that translates to stop being ridiculous. “Fen. Have you seen the look on their faces all day? They were insufferable. You made them feel like Gods. You caught 'em by surprise.”

Fen frowns, turning back to face Margo. There’s always a hint of teasing in Margo’s eyes when she’s trying to mess with someone, but Fen doesn’t see it now. Come to think of it, Fen hasn’t seen teasing from Margo in a while. 

Margo arches an eyebrow, quizzical.

“I hope they like the cupcakes,” Fen says after a long pause. “They’re Josh’s recipe, you know, except Julia and I skipped the hellebore.”

The leaves in question were picked fresh from pleurisy hellebore plants at the edge of the Darkling Woods. Besides their medicinal properties to treat magically-inflicted ailments, the hellebore leaves, once dried and ground into a fine powder for consumption, could induce hour-long hallucinations of tap-dancing purple pegasi. Josh had insisted they made a pit-stop for these along with a dozen other psychedelic plants after their rescue. Eliot and Margo were all too happy to go along, insisting to an affronted-looking Quentin that this “little field trip” was “necessary for the sake of science”. 

Margo purses her lips, clearly disgruntled. “It’s probably for the best,” she says in the end. “But I mean, fuck, I’d pay anything to see Q and Alice high as a kite, trying to ride invisible horses.”

“Margo!” Fen chastises, feeling laughter bubble up her throat. 

The bed shakes under the weight of her giggles, and a few seconds later, Margo joins in. 

“It’s their first resurrection day,” Margo tells Fen when she stops wheezing. “I’ll let it slide.”

Down in the holding cells of Whitespire, when Fen and Josh had been locked up by the Dark King for Ember knows how long, Fen used to dream about seeing Margo again. She hadn’t known if Eliot survived, but she’d wanted to give Margo a hug, either way—she knows Margo needs it more than she’ll ever admit. 

Fen hadn’t been able to let herself hope back then, but now she has all the chances in the world. Fen moves closer and throws one arm over Margo, looping the other beneath her neck. The bed dips a little under the weight of her hug, and a second later, Margo’s hands find their ways on her back, too, warm and inviting through the cool silk of her borrowed nightgown. 

“Thanks, Margo.”

Fen doesn’t need to look at Margo to know she’s smiling. Somehow, she can just feel it. She closes her eyes and feels Margo relax. Slowly but surely, Margo’s becoming less defensive around her. Fen rather likes this change, along with everything else going on in her life.

“Next Easter, I’m baking the cupcakes,” Margo says when she finally pulls away, stroking Fen’s cheek with her thumb. “Can’t always let them get away this easy.”

◊

To Quentin and Alice’s utter embarrassment, the welcome-back-from-the-dead presents become a new tradition. April Fools’ day means nothing compared to the shit someone comes up with for Easter, and everyone else is happy to follow along, Julia most of all. Julia may have been a Goddess once, and maybe still a Goddess-to-be someday, but Fen knows that deep down, she has the most human way of loving them all. 

And if Julia has to show that love through weaving Easter ribbons in their hair, or leaving a flock of magical, glitter-pink mockingbirds by their bedroom windows, or encasing them inside a magically-solidified chocolate eggshell and demanding that they eat their way out—well, Fen doesn’t think Quentin and Alice mind that at all.

On their second Easter, with Quentin and Alice crammed side-by-side on the golden chair that neither would relinquish, Eliot announces that he much prefers their form of Easter celebration to the traditional one. Jesus has become irrelevant in their “grande, polytheistic scheme of extraterrestrial adventures”, to quote, and all Eliot really wants to do is start a new belief system based around resurrected magicians. 

“We need a name,” Penny calls out, interrupting Eliot’s melodramatic speech. Julia throws Penny a mock-glare and elbows him gently on the side while Kady rolls her eyes, chuckling. 

“Alright. A name.” Eliot relents, lowering his glass of sparkling lime water in a Martini glass. “The religion named for you two will have, like, more bunnies and less conquest.”

Being possessed had apparently given Eliot a more cautious outlook on certain aspects of his life. Eliot had been trying to cut back on his drinking _just_ a little for now, but it’s a start. Alice had proposed sparkling water as an alternative for booze on weekdays, and everyone’s on board. Fen had found herself a little too obsessed over the strawberry and kiwi flavored one, downing them by the gallon each week. The Children of Earth, for all their peculiarities, know what it takes to make a good drink.

“The Walking Dead!” Julia raises her glass and wrinkles her nose, trying not to giggle.

“Boo!” Kady calls out. 

Julia shoves Kady playfully, knocking her into a laughing Penny.

“Ooh!” Josh beams. “Cupcake frosting piped to look like a brain! Red jelly filling! I’m down.” 

Fen chuckles, as do everyone else. Having been through more plot-twisty bloodshed than most, any fear of blood Fen and her friends had would have vanished about three battles ago. 

On the golden chair, Quentin shakes his head dramatically, the floppy brown ears of his newly-knitted bunny-themed hat whipping back and forth around his head. “_No_. No more cupcakes.” Quentin raises his arms in surrender.

They spend Ember knows how long trying to come up with a name for this so-called new religion, but never settle on anything. After many rounds of bickering, Alice announces that all the cake talk made her hungry, and next thing Fen knows, all nine of them are cramped up in the open kitchen wearing aprons, ducking and weaving around each other as flours scatter through the air. They’re all trying to do their own sponge and frosting to contribute to one gigantic tiered cake, which eventually turns out to be a “Frankenstein’ed fucking disaster”—Margo’s words, not Fen’s.

By the time the sun is setting, they lay on the kitchen floor with dried bits of batter on their hair and frosting down the collars of their shirts, entirely stuffed and actively dying from their midday dessert, which turned out scrumptious despite its appearance. No one bothers to get up and make dinner because no one wants to move their asses off the ground. Maybe around midnight, they’ll be starving again, and Eliot can try his hand at that chicken roulade recipe he’s been raving about. 

Alice is still wearing her bunny hat after Quentin’s had been “borrowed” by Eliot halfway through their mess of a bake-off. She twirls the soft gray floppy ears with gentle fingers as she turns on the floor to face Fen, the corners of her mouth quirking into a full-dimpled smile. “Thank you, Fen,” Alice says. “For all this.”

Fen feels her cheeks warm. “We’re happy you two came back.”

Every April, for years to come, Fen and her friends will drop whatever it is they’re doing and let someone take over their jobs for a week or two. They always cram themselves inside the penthouse that Kady—_and_ Julia and Penny—now own by all legal means. Fen finds herself looking forward to these trips in a way she used to look forward to going back to her old village where she grew up. She doesn’t know when she started thinking of this strange city of concrete on Earth as home.

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaand a big shoutout to my buddy @hidden-inside-of-you for letting me steal your quote about more bunnies and less conquest :D


End file.
